Update: It has been brought to my attention that everything I wrote below is wrong. Just dead wrong. Special thanks to Geoff Shackleford for bringing it to my attention. I don’t really know what the standard thing to do in this scenario is, but deleting the post makes it seem like I’m just running away from it, so I’m adding this note and owning the fact that I was 100% wrong, and Koepka’s 2014 FedExCup points still do count. I apologize to the PGA Tour for ripping them a new one, when I was the one who completely messed it up. I’m not sure where my error was in my calculations, but it doesn’t matter. Also, I apologize to Geoff and anyone else that shared the article for making you look bad.

But anyways, if you want to read something that makes no sense, continue on….

If I actually cared about the Presidents Cup, I would make a much bigger stink about this. Also, if this was about Robert Streb (sorry, #StrebNation), I probably wouldn’t consider this post worthy. What I do care about though, is Brooks Koepka. Yes, I’ve admittedly exhausted this topic on twitter, but I feel my outrage of the lack of coverage he’s received this year (mainly by CBS) is justified. So bear with me for a bit…

Bitching about a player receiving what we consider to be insufficient attention and coverage is not something new to us. It seems hard to believe or comprehend due to what has transpired in the last few months regarding Spieth, but flashing back to the Northern Trust Open at Riviera this year, Spieth bogeyed the 18th hole to finish one shot out of a playoff….. and was not shown on CBS until the 17th hole. Now, the topic of CBS’ coverage probably deserves a post of its own, but the same injustice has been bestowed upon is in recent weeks with another man-crush of ours, and that is of course Brooks Koepka.

Brooks finished T5 at the PGA Championship, and not one single shot was shown live on Sunday. Not one single one. This past week at the Wyndham, he finished T6, and was not shown live until the 16th hole. We’re talking about, by all indications, one of the future American stars of the game, and we can’t even watch him play golf in our own country. It’s not like he’s come out of nowhere, and it’s not like CBS hasn’t had a chance to learn from its own mistakes. He won the Waste Management Phoenix Open this year, and wasn’t shown on TV until he eagled the 15th hole!

The television coverage all is an entirely different topic than the purpose of this post. The point of me mentioning the coverage is that it seems like, in a sport desperate to embrace a youth movement, the networks and the Tour are doing their best to suppress one of the game’s biggest and brightest young stars. Why are we continuing to make it harder and harder for the young talents to break through?

This is what Koepka looks like

I’m moving my bitching a little further down the line to the injustice that the PGA Tour is bestowing upon the young idol regarding the Presidents Cup. Koepka famously chose to play the European Tour last year instead of playing the Web.com tour, and went the route of using his sponsor exemptions to earn enough money to obtain special temporary membership on the PGA Tour. He sealed up that membership rather early in the process, and played 16 events on the PGA Tour last year, nabbing two top-5 finishes, including a T4 at the U.S. Open. However, as he was not technically a member of the PGA Tour, he was unable to obtain FedEx Cup points.

My initial reaction is closer to “meh” than it is actual outrage. I’ve made it very clear in the past that I think the new qualifying system is terrible, but it is what it is. I don’t care about the FedEx Cup standings, or really even the playoffs for that matter, so I’m not going to feign indignation over him being unable to play the money grab at the end of the year, even though I don’t agree with it. The problem with this system lies in the fact that all of Koepka’s results for the 2013-2014 season count for exactly nothing when it comes to Presidents Cup qualifying.

The qualifying system for the U.S. team is a rather simple formula: All FedEx Cup points earned from the 2013 BMW Championship onward, with points earned in the 2015 calendar year counting double. Despite being credited with zero points for anything before this season, he currently sits at 16 in the standings. By my calculation, if he was eligible to earn FedEx Cup points in 2013-2014, he would have earned 730. With those 730 points, he would be sitting at 11 in the standings, and ready to take Chris Kirk’s spot at 10 that will be available due to Kirk’s injury.

This of course sounds redundant, but the whole point of qualifying is to get a team of the most qualified players. At this point we should acknowledge the fact that it is the PGA Tour themselves that also runs the Presidents Cup. The same PGA Tour that devised a qualifying system that actually encourages young players to pack their bags and play thousands of miles from home on the European Tour, then has the audacity to say that any points actually earned on the PGA Tour don’t even count. Even though he wasn’t technically a member of the tour at the time, why wouldn’t those FedEx Cup points count towards the Presidents Cup standings? Does that fact that he was not a member make him any less qualified to represent the U.S. team? His results in 2013-2014 are events that actually happened. He got the prize money for those events. Why the hell would the FedEx Cup points not count towards qualifying!? I’m sure the answer is “because he wasn’t a member,” but how is that a justifiable answer? Since as of last week, the PGA Tour was incapable of calculating the standings of their own extremely simple system, is it too late to change this injustice?

This may seem like a moot point, since Koepka is going to be a captain’s pick anyways (be ready for me to burn this entire place to the ground if not), but this essentially leaves Haas with only one captain’s pick. Does he then go with his son? Does he want to deal with the outrage of leaving Horschel off another team? How can you ignore what Streb has done this year? Maybe it will all work itself out in two weeks, and this won’t matter, but this egregious oversight by the PGA Tour can not go unnoticed.

#BrooksWasNotHere